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Adam

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The Big Babies

We are about to go flying! I hope within the month we are airborne with ten pounds of dead weight. It is a big day. After several years, we are turning the corner. It was not easy, and I would like to thank my folks and friends for sticking with me. Inventorship is far from an easy process. Now it is time to give birth to revenue ;)

In order to continue a beloved American tradition, each of our factory Big Babies will have unique nose art. I have been drawing for months to get this many pictures together. I am sure if you know me and the project, you probably know each of them. So I will not spend much time explaining them, I hope that everyone likes them. I have shirts available on the cafe press site. I think that they really bring out the smile in me when I talk about the planes, or the women who inspired them.

Trip to the SPIE Defense Sensing Show

I went to the SPIE Defense Sensing Conference this week. It was a nicely arranged affair in the Marriot World Center in Orlando. They insisted that you park several miles away and use one of the shuttle buses to get to the conference, that worked out well. The buses were often enough that you were not forced to wait forever to go either way and they gave you granola bars and water for the trouble. Don't they know, engineers get bagels, factories get doughnuts? You can't make them think...

After perusing the technical book area, which was pretty well stocked with an array of SPIE documents and textbooks,, if you had the cash. I was pretty interested in their IR and Spectroscopy handbooks, but they were pricey. If anyone has a heart, I would gladly accept a torrent or a photocopy :)

We spoke with several vendors in the cavernous exhibition area. It was clear that in many ways we were just not up to the task of doing business there. I also noticed that people feeding out of the government trough were particularly mislead in the value of things. How can someone in good faith try to sell tank windows to a normal person? Especially when they cost $30k+ to start in bulk. We saw some neat optics stuff. To be honest, I was not even sure what you did with it. Even as slowly as we fly, a FLIR with 300 lines, 90deg range and 30Hz is going to be hard to use unless the goal is just to get an image.

All in all, a good trip. A little humility is a good thing.

Facebook Advertising 3400 people exposed 5 hits received

This week, I ran a basic advertisement to see how effective it would be. I cross-posted a philanthropic interest for Veteran's Day. If I sold any of the following shirts,

shirt #1 or shirt #2

My idea was to donate any proceeds to the Alachua County Veterans of Foreign Wars post. They do lots of work at the Gainesville VA hospital. I sent it to three veteran's groups for 3400 possible people. I got 5 hits. Woohoo!

Ok, not the glorious turn out that I had hoped. However, it was an interesting thing that it was such a huge failure. I guess it did not cost me anything, but I would happily donate any proceeds from these shirts to help Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

More adventures in internet marketing as I come up with them. Reddit ok, I thought I would get more traffic by getting into some of the track back systems. Reddit.com put up 120 links, not one had anything to do with my content. Heck, even Google AdSense has trouble with this. From what I can see, it is not so good at uncommon keywords. So short of articles of white panties on eastern European schoolgirls I am not sure how helpful AdSense is even for my topics.

Special Thanks to Willy from Nutech-racing.com

A special thanks to Willy from www.Nutech-Racing.com. He is knowledgeable, friendly, freaky fast. I mean he is faster than Jimmy John's sammiches at lunch time. Check out Willy's site for fast, courteous service and great prices on rc stuff and UGV cross-over information.

Thanks again Willy!

Shout Outs to Some Small Businesses run By Great Guys

We are all in this together. I wanted to take a second to drop some names for everyone. If you need composites work done or molds made at reasonable rates. Call Robert at Mohrbacher Composites he really did a great job on some sick projects. If you have more normal fabrication requirements, the guys at Impact Fab, tell Ross, that the Buzz Labs boys sent you. Ross works wonders with his water jet.

Thanks guys for helping us with my bad ideas!

Driving Business to Your Website

This is one of the mor difficult aspects of internet marketing and small businesses. Many others can spend more resrouces to get the word out at any given time. I have tried to approach it from a step-wise perspective. First step was to get the basic website out, without content you have nothing. A buddy of mine said to make sure that you do not make sure that you do not cludder ideas or muddy your message trying to stuff too much on each page. There are plenty of ways to make the search engines pick up your content in systematic ways.

Next, gather up your all of your suppliers or products that you normally use and make a simple page that links out to their official pages, that way your name or website will be linked to theirs. This will not in and of itself make a huge contribution, but if they look up this junk sucks, it will bring up your name. ;) As they say, any advertising where they spell your name correctly, is good advertising.

I am not sure if this next step was the best, but I found some of the low cost tshirt and mouse pad sites and through a bunch of products out there. People in general would not associate technical ideas with a tshirt. However, it gives you a different lane of approach to your content. Make sure that you fill out the description sections of each item and try to make sure your main url shows up in as many places as possible. These link backs help your search engine scores and increase the possibility that someone will click through to your site. Traffic, even bounce traffic is good. You never know whose little brother will see a t-shirt with a logo and pass it onto their brother the director of your next customer's organization.

Another simple and seemingly the most effective plan of attack. Use your open source community. They are mindless minions of habit. Ok, that is a bit harsh. However, Sourceforge, CodePlex and similar sites have huge mostly anonymous traffic, if you can publish any of your source code as a project and link back to your website you will get the word out to a large audience of people
with similar interests. I have found that techies run in circles and that they are inexoribly drawn to cool projects even if they are not in their fields of expertise. Likewise, if you use a product that has a user community, by all means post. Try to be as active as possible and keep posting your url in your signature. That link back thing is the cheapest and simplest advertising you can achieve.

If you can manage it, you may also put up single page advertising sites with kind of universal message information on any of the better trafficked free hosting sites. Google, Microsoft and all of the 500 pound apes have free sites. Free is good, at this point you are trading time for initial expense. So put up your message pages and cross-link them as best as you can without making them look like the original Yahoo. Different url's linking back help increase your score. If they get you 2% more hits every month then you are 2% ahead for copying and pasting an advertisement to a database somewhere. When it gets taken down in six months for lack of updates, oh well, it was free.

Tweets that get sucked into the ether by retweeters are good too. However, it is not as guaranteed a method because they are simple text messages and can carry less information than the free poster sites. By all means, spam the web with your message. With billions if not trillions of pages, make sure that you get your information out there in as many places as possible.

Blogging is my last idea, but it is not as effective. Just from a time perspective you have to keep putting into it and that makes it more expensive than just chucking out some posters. Posters are good because you can have a graphical message. Even back in the day...
Tamany Hall said they did not care what they wrote, their constituents could not read... They could UNDERSTAND pictures.

Business Opportunities in Central Europe or Brazil

Buzz Labs is looking for business contacts in Central Europe or Brazil. We are seeking interesting applications of UAS and UGV in most places or partners to help develop certain aspects of technologies for related projects. Our business is about developing technologies to support unmanned systems in general or how to achieve certain commercial or scientific requirements.

Maximizing our understanding of networking and aviation knowledge is allowing for fascinating new insights into what is possible even with the current states of technologies. We are most interested in multi-spectral image analysis, distributed pico-computing, alternatives to radio control, streaming technologies,power systems and system configuration.

Central Europe and Brazil are great stable markets that we would like to become a bigger player in. Please feel free to contact us with questions or ideas.

info@fatmanflying.com

Motors, motors, motors

Did anyone else ever notice that anything truly important must be said thrice for men to notice? Girls, girls girls, XXX, I have a million examples. Just an aside, but interesting to note. That may be why no one ever reads DANGER, and stays away, Or don't click.

This week I have been fighting the forces of evil all week. I know the buzzlabs.us site is not a work of art. It is a work in progress. Yeah, yeah need more pictures. Let's get one step at a time. I found several distributors of NEU motors whose website said, yeah they are in stock. Seems that they need to update their site? WTF still are not online with inventory status... or are not advertising things correctly. If you don't have it, just say so.

Anyway, there I was thinking I had the NEU motors in hand 1912/3Y jobs. however, it seems that there is no such thing as in stock with these guys. They are supposed to be the best. I have been reading that the heli guys dig the X-Era motors from NC too.

I called Dave at X-Era. He was friendly and very helpful. I will keep up with his 4035 3y 400kv motors. He is actually sizing a motor for us to swing these huge props. I am actually pretty curious what he will come up with. The NEU calculator came up with the 1912 line of motors because of the three bladed props. I will post what he says when I get back his response.

If anyone knows of any 5-6 bladed props that would be good to know too. I heard on the boards that Dario makes them. It is my opinion that I can slow the prop down enough by adding blades to lower our planes and reduce the current draw by adding voltage. I would love to get our current draw to 20A at 9s (33.3V) our batteries would last for a lot longer. I think maybe Bolly Props down in Oz may have them, but three bladed jobs though.

Get Your Buzz Gear

Hey everyone,

I just got the Buzz Gear store set up. Please help the cause, get some great Buzz stuff. I make pennies on it, but advertising is awesome.

Let me know if you would like to see something else, I tried to have a selection of stuff.

Thanks,
Adam

What I am Thinking At the Moment

At the moment, I am trying to decide what is the most interesting way to proceed with this blog. It is important to discuss some of the howto aspects of UAVs and autopilots. I think that it is also important to speak about some of the interesting applications and business difficulties of it as well.

At the moment, there are many stories in the news about blowing up bad guys with thunder bolts from the sky. However, I think that this is not the most interesting thing to be done with the technologies. We are investigating a number of small-scale recycled materials and techniques to apply energy reclamation systems so that the uavs harvest as much of their energy from the environment and recycle as much as they can.

For the record, the soybean epoxies available are just not as good as their petro-chemical equivalents. We are still trying to use them in our skin layups. If we can make use of them, they do come from a renewable resource stream. These adhesives are not recyclable though.

Another big idea, that Buzz Labs is working on is the heat pipe system to pull heat away from the motors and batteries and either use that to generate trickle charges or to be able to cool the batteries to a point that we can keep their chemistries from over heating down to the limit of their endurance. Lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries do have some physical limitations that make exciting failures possible. Read about the exploding notebook batteries. Buzz's engineers are seeing some success with maintaining battery temperatures even above their rated currents. Battery performance increases are especially good news for the racers and autonomous vehicle systems

We will keep you posted here as we make significant breakthroughs or cool flaming rc parts.

Squadron Badge Ideas

Every squadron needs a symbol. Some research into the oldest American squadrons lead me through some interesting history. More filler for my head, I must admit. From two of these, I drew up some low color variants. Let me know which looks best out of each group.

US UAV Squadron

Jolly Roger	Jolly Roger with Triangles	Jolly Roger Round
EU UAV Squadron
Felix Beer	Felix Camera	Felix Bomb

Let me know which you guys like best. email

The "Fat Man" Is Still Grounded, He Is At the Pub So We Won't Worry Just Yet

Yeah, this kind of sucks. After a year of construction and planning, we find out that there is an international weapons treaty that says that you cannot sell certain weight vehicles internationally that have autonomous guidance systems capable of free flight beyond a certain range. Ok, I get it. Who wants Tom, Dick or Harry building a 150lb (70kg) pop rocket and flying it half way across the planet to make a real mess.

When you think about it, they are just setting rules to make it hard for the forces of evil. I have no interest in being one of the "dark side." My master tells me so. Ok, no more Star Wars references, but I make no promises. If anyone knows more about the "". Or what the real rules are about any of this, please let me know. There is no interest in using this device for any government purpose. I want to pull banners at the beach or to do small scale spraying of crops.

Another question that would be great to hear some explanation of and/or some reasonable listing of what can be discussed between international unmanned vehicle (UAV/UAS/UGV) colleagues. I would hate to blip someone's radar because I was talking about a simple guidance system idea at the pub. Yeah, yeah this is a real problem, I am more likely to be drinking a pint than trying to sink a 40' put on the back nine of Pebble Beach.

I am pretty sure that this is a messy topic and probably best left well-enough alone. However, if there is a chance to get this sorted and get the Fat Man to fly as more than a giant-scale RC plane that would be freaking awesome. Any qualified help is appreciated, I know that the FAA has been pretty draconian in their official guidelines.

Viral marketing Ideas

Marketing a small company is tough for anyone. So I am looking for cute ways to drive traffic through the site. Hopefully, traffic that wants to buy a plane. One idea is to try the viral video route. A colleague of mine from work came up with a great title. Let me know what you guys think of, "Fat Man Flying presents A School Girl Plane White Panties First Flight". That should get us some of the other search hits from YouTube and on the blog.

Pity, I do not live in Czech anymore, it always seemed a lot easier to talk a girl into letting me see her panties for a hare-brained video. Got to love it. I have some other ideas, but the viral video has the best chance to bring traffic to the site. We have started spamming business cards at UAV and fly-ins. Anyone have any other ideas? At least try to be professional, I am trying to run a legitimate business.

What the Heck Are the Real Rules?

I have been canvasing anything that says UAV and not Boeing, Lockheed or General Atomics for several years now. One thing that I have noticed is that few if any sites even mention much less brag about Special Airworthiness Certificates or even Experimental Flight Airworthiness qualifications for their UAS. Knowing that they seem pretty tough to get still, I would think that they would happily brag about the fact theirs received one.

So how are they making money? Is this some sort of strange smoke and mirrors game? If you do not have a certification you are not allowed to fly in the United States' airspace. So how are they doing it? I know way back when in 1998 they flew from New Foundland to Ireland, major props for that. Back then noone really cared or probably knew to care. What about now? As I read it on DIY drones and other places the rules are pretty clear, no commercial and LOS. I get it, it seems like a good idea to film the kids' soccer game with your UAV. It does right up to the part when the LiPo packs overdraw and now you have a really cool shot on goal.

As a matter of fact, it took me a few minutes to come up with that example. Most of mine were far more brutal, but that seemed to be a happy medium. Little Jimmy running away as dad's new rc plane which was an ARF and still took him two weeks to build catches on fire. Mom's new HD camcorder and all comes down in a ball of wicked fire streaking toward the goal. Oh no, Gahd'zee'ra. Always have to have the monster movie reference when a flaming anything streaks across the sky. Mothra could not shoot flames.

Does anyone have any ideas how these companies stay afloat? Is it just a better marketing face than balance sheet? I can say that I am intrigued how you can be much bigger than a room in the garage sized company under the current regime. I guess maybe there is a private property application here, maybe that is enough to keep you afloat. At least in the , what they do not know, will not hurt them ballpark.

Welcome to Buzz Labs' Unofficial Development Blog

Yeah, yeah first posts always are tough. Here is a good college try. Don't forget to visit us at http://www.buzzlabs.us or at Facebook Buzz Labs User Group or friend us.